To be honest, before my diagnosis I couldn’t think of anything positive about my anxiousness let alone powerful. But now that I know what I am dealing with, I have discovered two things: (1) a lot of other people are also silently suffering with this disorder; and (2) we all need more stories that center authentic anxiety experiences in a lifegiving way. If you are a Kid Lit creator with an anxiety disorder, here are 5 super powers that you can tap into to strengthen your character arcs:
- The Universal Experience: Every human being on the planet will experience anxiety at some point in their life and especially in their growing up years. While this has always been true, the types and duration of anxiety experiences among young people have grown substantially over the last few decades. As creators, we can embrace all the ups and downs of our lifelong disorder, dig deep into the realities of our emotional struggles past and present, and create authentic stories that young readers of all ages will be able to relate to.
- The Sense of Reciprocal Empathy: If you’ve been writing/illustrating for any length of time, you’ve probably heard that readers need to care about or feel empathy toward the main character in a story. Tapping into a universal experience like anxiety can be a powerful way to create that empathetic connection. However, it can also be a way to help the reader feel like the character would have this same empathy towards them, like they could be friends who care about each other. When we craft a well-developed anxiety experience and resulting character arc, more than just allowing our reader to feel seen or understood, it allows them to begin to feel like they are not alone in the world and that they don’t need to hide or be ashamed of their anxieties—and that is exactly the kind of breathing room that lets our readers know that they matter and that their struggles matter.
- A Broad Spectrum of Unique Characters: One of the things I hear agents, editors, and art directors ask for most is a unique character—one with a unique voice, unique perspectives, and unique experiences. People with anxiety disorders are not a monolith. Anxiety can develop and manifest at many times and in many ways throughout life. Add to that the variety of backgrounds, daily lives, relationships, and the many other factors that can be comorbid with anxiety plus each person’s unique combination of triggers, self-talk, and self-care needs, and the spectrum of unique character possibilities becomes endless.
- Deeper Character Arcs: If you have a name for your disorder and you have started learning how to manage it, you are on a journey of self-discovery. As people with anxiety, we often have the benefit of working through this process with a mentor (aka a counselor). Each new thing that we discover about ourselves can be seen as its own character. When we take the time to examine how it functions in our experience—where it came from, how it effects us in different “scenes” throughout our life, how it has grown and changed, and how we have grown and changed because of it—then we can give the character who embodies that piece of our anxiety the kind of depth that readers deserve.
- Richer Relationships: No relationship is easy. But when one or both people in that relationship have an anxiety disorder, it takes a lot of patience and thoughtful listening for both sides to come to a place of understanding just so that they can begin to genuinely relate with one another. From there, they can work towards creating a more intimate friendship or other relationship. The process can be long and challenging, and the end result is rarely a Happily Understood Ever After. Someone who is struggling through internal tensions and feelings of conflict (or being conflict avoidant) may feel overwhelmed by the difficulties of trying to be understood, trying to relate, or even trying to understand the other person. But again, being able to capture these nuances from our own experiences allows us to create richly layered relationships between our characters with anxiety and others who may or may not also live with this disorder.
To be clear, using your anxiety super powers to strengthen character arcs doesn’t mean that you have to air all of your personal experiences on the page. But what it does mean, is that we can tap into that deep well of our disorder—the good, the bad, and the messy—and create characters that will speak meaningfully into our readers’ lives.
Which of these super powers resonated with you most? Which would have made the biggest difference to you as a child reader?
Free Resource
Ready to put your super powers to work? Get started with the free Anxiety Traits Inventory for Character Development worksheet below:
Kristen C. Strocchia—Children's Writer & Speaker 